U.S. Sanctions Colombia’s Leader, One of President Trump’s Harshest Critics

Americas|U.S. Sanctions Colombia’s Leader, One of President Trump’s Harshest Critics

The United States announced economic sanctions on Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, on Friday, following Mr. Petro’s criticism of the Trump administration’s military actions in the Caribbean.

Washington also said it was sanctioning Mr. Petro’s wife, a son, and a longtime political ally who is now Colombia’s interior minister.

Such sanctions are often reserved for people accused of major drug crimes and human rights violations.

The United States Treasury Department, in a news release, said it was sanctioning Mr. Petro and his allies because the Colombian leader had allowed drug production to flourish since taking office in 2022.

Mr. Petro, a leftist, is one of few leaders in Latin America who have been vocal in their criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision to bomb boats carrying people his administration says are drug traffickers. The bombings have killed dozens of people, and Mr. Petro has said that Colombians have been among them and has accused the United States of committing murder.

Mr. Trump has responded by calling Mr. Petro “an illegal drug leader” and said that he would cut off aid to Colombia. About $377 million was designated to Colombia in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service. About a third of that money is meant for law enforcement and narcotics control.

The announcement by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as OFAC, freezes any American assets held by sanctioned individuals and blocks American citizens from doing business with them.

The cultivation of coca, the base product in cocaine, has soared since Mr. Petro took office in 2022. It also soared under his predecessor, Iván Duque, a conservative and close ally of Washington Republicans.

The Treasury Department accused Mr. Petro of providing “benefits” to “narco-terrorist organizations” and said that Colombia was “failing demonstrably” to uphold its drug control responsibilities. The release claims that Mr. Petro has allied himself with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat.

Mr. Petro, a former member of a rebel group that demobilized in 1990, rose to prominence in Colombian politics by exposing and denouncing links between narco-traffickers and politicians in his country.

He is a longtime critic of Washington’s approach to fighting drugs in Latin America, favoring a strategy that focuses more on rural development — giving farmers who grow coca other opportunities — than on major military action.

In his speeches, he often holds U.S. consumers of cocaine partially responsible for the violence that drug trafficking has brought to his country. And he uses the same word Mr. Trump does — “poison” — to talk about cocaine.

His critics on the right in Colombia have said that his approach to drugs is too soft, and has allowed the industry to grow.

In response to the sanctions announcement on Friday, Mr. Petro said on X that his decades-long fight against drugs had only brought him punishment from a society he had tried to stop from consuming cocaine. “A total paradox,” he said. “But no steps back, and never on our knees.”

The other sanctioned individuals are Mr. Petro’s wife, Verónica Alcocer; one of his sons, Nicolás Petro; and his interior minister, Armando Benedetti.